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When the concept of libraries lending out e-books first came about, the idea had its skeptics. Some in the publishing industry worried that the practice could eat into e-book sales, while others questioned whether such a system would be popular or effective among consumers. Some recent statistics suggest that library e-book lending is taking off.

Driven in large part by the proliferation of tablets and e-readers, digital book lending is on the rise, according to OverDrive, a leading supplier of digital content to U.S. libraries. The company, which partnered with Amazon for its Kindle lending program, reported recently that it saw a 130% increase in traffic to its "virtual branch" websites last year. OverDrive works with 18,000 libraries to offer e-books and other digital content to members.

An op/ed piece in Make magazine by Phil Torrone talks about the many places around the world where you can stop in and learn how to make stuff. These Hackerspaces, Fab Labs, and other geeking-out lending libraries are replacing, well, lending libraries, to be blunt. "What if we were to convert just 1% or even 10% of the 9,000 US public libraries into Tech Shops?" he posits. "Libraries and librarians are underused for skill building. Libraries have the space, they have net connections, they're in great locations; why not evolve?"

The Digital Public Library of America, an organization dedicated to building a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all, held its first plenary meeting in Washington DC this morning and announced $5 million in funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Arcadia Fund. "What Carnegie did for public libraries a century ago, the DPLA could--if successful--accomplish for our era," Peter Baldwin, Chair of the Donor Board at the Arcadia Fund.

The organization says it is founded on four key elements: open source code, linked meta-data, multi-media content and tools and services. What would a new world online be without a new public library?

The CEO of OverDrive, which distributes e-books and audiobooks to libraries, has dropped a pretty obvious hint that the Kindle will join other major e-readers in public libraries in September. EarlyWord reports that Steve Potash looked "like a kid with a delicious secret" at OverDrive's Digipalooza conference last weekend, saying that he was "not allowed to announce a date ye[t]," but he included this blunt clue in his "Crystal Ball Report" during the final session:

Streamlining (both downloading and ordering)
Explosion (we have gone from two reading devices to 85 and more are coming)
Premium (the library catalog as the most premium, value-added site on the Web)
Traffic (enormous growth coming by year's end)

Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework for working with the Canvas element. According to its website, it's based on and largely compatible with the Adobe Illustrator scripting environment Scriptographer.

It's comparable to Raphael, a JavaScript library for vector imaging using SVG. According to the Paper.js FAQ "We have decided to use the Canvas object as the main backend for now because it is faster than SVG and allows us to implement and optimize our own Scene Graph / Document Object Model. We will be offering SVG (and hopefully PDF) importing and exporting in the future."

The American Library Association (ALA) has just released its 2011 Public Library Funding and Technology Access Survey, and among its findings, 67% of public libraries in the U.S. now offer free access to e-books for their patrons. That's up 30% since 2007. Of course, access to e-books ranges greatly from state-to-state: 100% of Maryland and Utah libraries offer e-books, while only 25% of ilbraries in Mississippi do so, for example.

But even in the states where e-book access is commonplace, when it comes to making digital literature available to their patrons, libraries face a number of challenges. We've covered many of these issues here. Most well-known among these obstacles was the controversial announcement earlier this year by publisher Harper Collins to have library e-books "self-destruct" after 26 checkouts, forcing libraries to re-purchase titles in order to secure more checkouts. This among other factors (including, of course, budget issues) has made the future of e-books in libraries unclear.

The number of people who check out e-books via their local library is still pretty small - less than 15% of people in a recent survey indicated that they turned to libraries for their digital content. In part, it's been difficult for libraries to offer e-books to their patrons, but as the popularity of the e-books and e-readers has skyrocketed, it's clear that libraries are keen to find a solution to make e-book lending possible. And an announcement today from the digital content distributor OverDrive is a huge leap toward making that possible.

Earlier this spring, Amazon announced that it would be working with OverDrive in order to make it possible for libraries to lend Kindle books to their patrons. OverDrive already provides digital content to libraries and schools, and by making the popular Amazon format an option, it was anticipated that many more people would be able to take advantage of library e-book lending.

I'm at JSConf in Portland, OR today. I just watched a presentation by John Hann from unscriptable making the case for modules instead of frameworks and libraries. Frameworks and libraries add a lot of weight to your applications. Also, they are difficult to migrate away from - creating some lock-in for a developer. Modules are meant to alleviate these problems, while still providing developers with a set of tools to speed-up development.

Despite some of the challenges of lending library books in digital formats, many libraries are exploring the e-book option. However, although there are a number of choices for e-readers and digital content providers, the list of devices that let you check out library books hasn't included the most popular e-reader of all: the Kindle.

That is, until today, with the announcement from Amazon this morning that it is launching a Lending Library "later this year" that will let Kindle owners check out books from their local library.

Sparks is a package management system for Codeigniter designed to make it easier to share, find and install libraries for the framework. You can browse the libraries shared on Sparks here.

Here are the Sparks team's reasons for the project's existence: